An Introduction to Islam, Third Edition, provides students with a thorough and unified topical introduction to the global religious community of Islam. It places Islam within a cultural, political, social, and religious context and examines its connections with Judeo-Christian morals. The text's integration of the doctrinal and devotional elements of Islam enables students to see how Muslims think and live--engendering understanding and breaking down stereotypes. An Introduction to Islam, Third Edition also reviews pre-Islamic history so students can see how Islam developed historically.

    Compiled in the fourteenth century by a prominent Syrian scholar, this four volume-set, translated in English, is a full examination, in chronological order, of the background, life and mission of the Prophet Muhammad.

    Eminent French historian Robert Mantran has written of Lewis's work: How could one resist being attracted to the books of an author who opens for you the doors of an unknown or misunderstood universe, who leads you within to its innermost domains: religion, ways of thinking, conceptions of power, culture--an author who upsets notions too often fixed, fallacious, or partisan. In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis brings together in one volume eleven essays that indeed open doors to the innermost domains of Islam. Lewis ranges far and wide in these essays. He includes long pieces, such as his capsule history of the interaction--in war and peace, in commerce and culture--between Europe and its Islamic neighbors, and shorter ones, such as his deft study of the Arabic word watan and what its linguistic history reveals about the introduction of the idea of patriotism from the West. Lewis offers a revealing look at Edward Gibbon's portrait of Muhammad in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (unlike previous writers, Gibbon saw the rise of Islam not as something separate and isolated, nor as a regrettable aberration from the onward march of the church, but simply as a part of human history); he offers a devastating critique of Edward Said's controversial book, Orientalism; and he gives an account of the impediments to translating from classic Arabic to other languages (the old dictionaries, for one, are packed with scribal errors, misreadings, false analogies, and etymological deductions that pay little attention to the evolution of the language). And he concludes with an astute commentary on the Islamic world today, examining revivalism, fundamentalism, the role of the Shi'a, and the larger question of religious co-existence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. A matchless guide to the background of Middle East conflicts today, Islam and the West presents the seasoned reflections of an eminent authority on one of the most intriguing and little understood regions in the world.

    While there are many answers to the question of “what went wrong” in the Muslim world, no one has decisively answered why it went wrong. Until now.In this eye-opening new book, foreign policy expert Robert R. Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture.Terrorism—from 9/11, to London, Madrid, and Mumbai, to the Christmas 2009 attempted airline bombing—is the most obvious manifestation of this crisis. But Reilly shows that the pathology extends much further. The Closing of the Muslim Mind solves such puzzles as: ·        why peace is so elusive in the Middle East·        why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development·        why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world·        why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years·        why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon·        why Muslim media frequently present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution Delving deeper than previous polemics and simplistic analyses, The Closing of the Muslim Mind provides the answers the West has so desperately needed in confronting the Islamist crisis.WHAT THEY ARE SAYING"The lack of liberty within Islam is a huge problem. Robert Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind shows that a millennium ago Muslims debated whether minds should be free to explore the world—and freedom lost. The intellectual history he offers helps to explain why Muslim countries fell behind Christian-based ones in scientific inquiry, economic development, and technology. Reilly provides astonishing statistics . . . [and] also points out how theology prefigures politics." —World Magazine  "As Robert R. Reilly points out in The Closing of the Muslim Mind . . . the Islamic conception of God as pure will, unbound by reason and unknowable through the visible world, rendered any search for cause and effect in nature irrelevant to Muslim societies over centuries, resulting in slipshod, dependent cultures. Reilly notes, for example, that Pakistan, a nation which views science as automatically impious given its view that an arbitrary God did not imprint upon nature a rational order worth investigating, produces almost no patents." —American Spectator "What happened to moderate Islam and what sort of hope we may have for it in the future is the subject of Robert Reilly’s brilliant and groundbreaking new book. The Closing of the Muslim Mind is a page-turner that reads almost like an intellectual detective novel...One thing Reilly’s account makes clear: Only when we move beyond the common platitudes of our contemporary political discussion and begin to deal with Islam as it really is — rather than the fiction that it is the equivalent of our Western culture dressed up in a burqa — will we be able to help make progress in that direction." — National Review Online

    Professor Michael Sells has captured the complexity, power, and poetry of the early suras of the Qur’án, the sacred scripture of Islam. In this second edition, Sells introduces important new translations of suras and a new preface that addresses the ongoing controversy over teaching about Islam and the Qur’an in American universities. Approaching the Qur’án presents brilliant translations of the short, hymnic suras associated with the first revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. Most of these early revelations appear at the end of text and are commonly reached only by the most resolute reader of existing English translations. These suras contain some of the most powerful, prophetic and revelatory passages in religious history. They offer the vision of a meaningful and just life that anchors the religion of one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants. Approaching the Qur'án is enriched by inclusion of free downloadable audio recordings of Quranic reciters, allowing readers an opportunity to hear the Qur'án in its original form. The book includes Sells’ Introduction to the Qur’án, commentaries of the suras, a glossary of technical terms, and chapters discussing the sound nature and gender aspects of the Arabic text.

    Together they called upon the West to confront the spiritual, cultural, and political malaise that have afflicted it in the earliest years of the 21st century. In the months that ensued, before Cardinal Ratzinger's election to the papacy, they developed their ideas into the eloquent dialogue that is Without Roots - a book that quickly became an Italian bestseller and is even more timely today than ever. With Europe shaken by the war in Iraq, terrorism, security, Israel, relations with the U.S., immigration, and the rejection of the EU constitution in both France and the Netherlands, the issue of European identity has profound implications for the rest of the world. Bringing together their unique vantage points as leaders of Church and State, Pope Benedict XVI and Pera challenge us to imagine what can be the future of a civilization that has abandoned its history for a relativist secularism. They call on the West to embrace a spiritual rather than political renewal-and to accept the moral beliefs that alone can help us to make sense of changes in technology, economics, and society. Pope Benedict XVI joins the President of the Italian Senate to offer a provocative critique of the spiritual, cultural, and political crisis afflicting the West.

    The author, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, traces the development of this dynamic faith and its impact on world history and politics, discussing the formation of Islamic belief and practice (in law, theology, and mysticism) and chronicling the struggle of Muslims to define and adhere to their Islamic way of life. This third edition has been updated throughout and is enhanced by new material in order to more accurately reflect the true diversity of Muslim cultures. A study of Pakistan has been added to the existing country-by-country survey, broadening the scope of the volume beyond the countries of the Middle East for the first time. A new section on Islam in the West explores the significance of the Muslim presence in the U.S., Great Britain, and Europe, examining some of the issues it has raised. Noteworthy figures, including Malcolm X, Warith Deen Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, are also considered. In the final chapter, Esposito discusses modern Muslim thinking on such issues as religious pluralism, democracy, and human rights. Lucidly written and expansive in scope, the third edition of Islam: The Straight Path provides keen insight into one of the world's least understood religions and is ideally suited for use in courses on Islam, comparative religions, and Middle Eastern history and culture.

    They come armed with arguments to show that belief in God is absurd and dangerous. In the name of societal progress, they promote purging the world of all religious practice. And they claim that people of faith are mentally ill. Some of the new atheists openly declare their hatred for the Judeo-Christian God.Christian apologists have been quick to respond to the new atheists’ arguments. But there is another dimension to the issue which begs to be addressed--the root causes of atheism. Where do atheists come from? How did such folks as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens become such ardent atheists? If we are to believe them, their flight from faith resulted from a dispassionate review of the evidence. Not enough rational grounds for belief in God, they tell us. But is this the whole story?Could it be that their opposition to religious faith has more to do with passion than reason? What if, in the end, evidence has little to do with how atheists arrive at their anti-faith? That is precisely the claim in this book. Atheism is not at all a consequence of intellectual doubts. These are mere symptoms of the root cause--moral rebellion. For the atheist, the missing ingredient is not evidence but obedience.The psalmist declares, “The fool says in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1), and in the book of Romans, Paul makes it clear that lack of evidence is not the atheist’s problem. The Making of an Atheist confirms these biblical truths and describes the moral and psychological dynamics involved in the abandonment of faith.

    An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level, making this writing as pertinent today as it was in the Fifteenth Century.

    This is incorrect, for at the very outset the movement was stigmatized as aberrant by the leading Sunni scholars of the day, because it rejected many of the traditional beliefs and practices of Sunni Islam and declared permissible warfare against all Muslims that disputed Wahhabi teachings. Nor can Wahhabism be regarded as a movement of “purification” or “renewal,” as the source of the genuinely revivalist movements that were underway at the time. Not until Saudi oil money was placed at the disposal of its propagandists did Wahhabism find an echo outside the Arabian Peninsula. The author discusses the rise of Wahhabism at the hands of Muhammad b. `Abd al-Wahhab, a native of Najd in the eastern part of the Arabian peninsula, the doctrines he elaborated to serve as the basis of the Wahhabi sect, and the alliance he concluded with the Saudi family, then rulers of the principality of al-Dir'iya. An early result of this union was a creeping conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, misnamed as jihad; it culminated in the sacking of Taif and the occupation of Mecca in 1803. This first Wahhabi occupation was short-lived but Wahhabism triumphed anew with the foundation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1925. Among the extensions of Wahhabism beyond Arabia must be accounted the perverse and brutal regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

    Atheism is one of the most important movements in modern Western culture. For the last two hundred years, it seemed to be on the verge of eliminating religion as an outmoded and dangerous superstition. Recent years, however, have witnessed the decline of disbelief and a rise in religious devotion throughout the world. In THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM, the distinguished historian and theologian Alister McGrath examines what went wrong with the atheist dream and explains why religion and faith are destined to play a central role in the twenty-first century.A former atheist who is now one of Christianity’s foremost scholars, McGrath traces the history of atheism from its emergence in eighteenth-century Europe as a revolutionary worldview that offered liberation from the rigidity of traditional religion and the oppression of tyrannical monarchs, to its golden age in the first half of the twentieth century. Blending thoughtful, authoritative historical analysis with incisive portraits of such leading and influential atheists as Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins, McGrath exposes the flaws at the heart of atheism, and argues that the renewal of faith is a natural, inevitable, and necessary response to its failures.THE TWILIGHT OF ATHEISM will unsettle believers and nonbelievers alike. A powerful rebuttal of the philosophy that, for better and for worse, has exerted tremendous influence on Western history, it carries major implications for the future of both religion and unbelief in our society.

    Containing 74 essays written over the last ten years, this book covers a range of subjects including the literature of the perceived masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries, the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture, film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.

    Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar and practitioner of Islamic law, guides students through the intricacies of the subject in this absorbing introduction. The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of Islamic law in its pre-modern natural habitat. The second part explains how the law was transformed and ultimately dismantled during the colonial period. In the final chapters, the author charts recent developments and the struggles of the Islamists to negotiate changes which have seen the law emerge as a primarily textual entity focused on fixed punishments and ritual requirements. The book, which includes a chronology, a glossary of key terms, and lists of further reading, will be the first stop for those who wish to understand the fundamentals of Islamic law, its practices and history.

    Drawing on Islamic sources of the Qur'an and Sunnah the author discusses the main emotional, social and sexual problems that can afflict relationships, suggesting many practical ways in which they can be resolved.

    Popular Bible teacher and author Ron Rhodes guides readers on an encouraging journey through this prophetic book, interpreting its picturesque language and revealing its reassuring promises. Each short chapter is perfect for a group Bible study or a personal quiet time and includes…Scripture Reading and Insights—a short passage of Revelation and easy-to-understand notes on each verse; Major Themes—brief summaries of the most important ideas; Digging Deeper with Cross-References—several other passages readers can look up on relevant topics; Life Lessons—practical and helpful applications to everyday life; Questions for Reflection and Discussion—thought-provoking starters for group discussions or personal journaling. Readers who may have been confused or intimidated by Revelation will appreciate this easy-to-understand and practical presentation of its empowering truths.